#kidd pivot

Crystal Pite and Jonathon Young from Kidd Pivot created this performance based on a Russian play called “Revizor” written by Nikolai Gogol in 1835. It is a story about a small town which corrupt Russian officials dominates. The officials get panicked by hearing the rumor that there will be an investigation held by government, thus they try to seek a favor to a man who arrives in town, by entertaining him as a guest and bribing. However, the man who is esteemed as an inspector, in actuality, just a lowly bureaucrat who happened to be passing by the town. He takes advantage of this misinterpretation and extorts the favor. It is only after he leaves the town that the real inspector arrives and the town officials finally realize their misjudgment.

The story carries on with the dancers on the stage who are disguised as the characters and lip-sync with voice-over lines which play loudly instead of music during the performance. The company dancers reveal their high physicality by inserting some dynamic movement while they act, however most of their movement is still more like gestures than dance since they are forced to adjust their physicality into the speed of dialogue. The idea that mixes dance and drama itself is not something innovative anymore, but what happens on this stage still has an extraordinary phenomenon where the words have a strong force to take away dancer’s ability and dominate the entire space. It is remarkable practice to see, however, it is also true that the way dancers move look quite cramped that is not not comfortable to see.

This sense of discomfort falls apart when the pre-recorded dialogue suddenly gets clogged like a broken cassette. The dancers stop their narrative-oriented move and start slow body isolation as if they are gradually transitioning into something different. The stage set which represents the context of the play is removed, and dancers take off their heavy costume and come back with ordinary dance wear. The duet danced by Ella Rothschild and Gregory Lau in this part was definitely one of the highlights of this work. They extend their limbs to the darkness as if they try to seek the further space out of their reach. They reach the state of off-balance where two bodies contain full of tension and right after that, they suddenly release, and extend their arms towards the space again, further and further... Following this spiral of dance, the audience’s sensibilities are also expended deeper and deeper. In the fully deconstructed stage, the dancer becomes the only element to define the space. What the audience sees in their eyes is no longer a small town of the play, but a microcosmos on the stage. In contrast to the storyline which contains full of ironic and helpless atmosphere, Pite and Young are able to describe the shape of hope through the dance.

Considering the structure of the work, it might be clearer to assemble all the story part in the first half so that the performance can have an epic finale with this dance part. However, somehow Pite and Young choose to “insert” the dance part in the flow of play.  As the dance part is coming to an end, the voice-over text changes into words which sound like a self-talk  and the dancer moves awkwardly as if the work were still on the production process. The reality of the world starts to blend in the stage and coexists with the fictional world. And at the very end of the dance part where only Gregory Lau is left on the entire stage, the voice saying” He is moved, he is moved...” is echoing over. The more dominant words become, the more intense he dances. As if he resists to be defined by the word, he rolls around the floor casting a strong eye to the audience.

When the dance and story appear alternately on the stage, like a twisted paper, the work expands its dimensions more and more. What is most experimental and challenging aspect of this work is to seek a border where these two principals antagonize by merging them in the transition moment, not by dividing them as completely different elements. Pite and Young determine not to cover or omit it even if there is massive contradiction and confusion lying down, rather to expose what is happening there and to show how it looks to the audience. Finally, it reveals an aspect in front of us as a huge brutal vortex, involving fiction and reality, stage and audience and whole space inside the theater. If that was the purpose of Pite and Young, perhaps they are the real “revisor” of this work.